No one at The Authors Guild or the American Bookseller’s Association was able to find an hour in their busy schedules to publicly debate their recent calls for an antitrust investigation into Amazon’s business practices, but they did find time this week to conduct a lengthy poffball interview of The Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger. On…Read More »

While it’s customary to gripe about the terrible service offered by a monopoly, some forget that a monopoly, especially a digital monopoly, is not nearly the sinecure that they assume. Dr Joshua Kim has been blogging over at Inside Higher Ed, where he’s been using his podium to rail against Amazon. Kim is a Kindle and…Read More »

Publishing Perspectives has a new article up this week in a recent consumer survey in Germany on reading and book buying habits. It’s part two of two, and if you read the article then i strongly urge you to read both at the same time. You see, PP made a mistake when they reported on…Read More »

When The Hustle published an editorial by a Kindle Store content farmer last Friday, they promised to follow up that post with one that details just how easy it is to game the Kindle Store. That follow up was published yesterday, and I’m not sure it’s worth reading. While the first (and possibly fake) post…Read More »

When Google launched Google Contributor last November they promoted the service with the pitch that users would be able to directly support the websites they visited most. The idea most commonly expressed in the media coverage at the time was that users would subscribe and pay anywhere from $1 to $3 a month. The suggested subscription…Read More »

Last week The Authors Guild sent an open letter to Congress, asking that the DMCA be changed so that ISPs shouldered the responsibility for keeping pirated content off the web (rather than copyright holders, where it belongs). When I covered the story, I addressed the point that the proposal was unworkable in and of itself, but…Read More »

Judging by the media circus that just came to town, something huge is about to happen in the book world. The book industry has kicked off a massive coordinated media campaign today. The target? Amazon. Lead by Authors United spokesperson David Streitfeld, multiple groups in the book industry have simultaneously decided today to send letters to…Read More »

Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is due to hit store shelves next week. This is one of the more anticipated releases of the year. The publishers ( HarperCollins in the US and Penguin Random House in the UK) should be doing everything they can to generate as much attention as possible and to capture as much…Read More »

Nielsen Bookscan released its estimates of the US print book market last week, which they describe as flat. I on the other hand, am not so sure we can trust their numbers. From PW: Sales of print books for the first six months of 2015 were running just about even with the same period in 2014…Read More »

There’s a story going around today that the upcoming models of the dual-screen Yotaphone will be dropping Android in favor of the Sailfish OS. A number of sites are picking up the wire report published by AFP yesterday, and on Saturday the story started getting picked up by tech blogs, including PocketNow, 9to5Google, Talk Android, Android…Read More »